The Machine Inside

A touring exhibition developed by the Field Museum and Denver Museum of Nature & Science, this is a really fun exhibit exploring all kinds of aspects of biomechanics. (But get those garbage cans away from the entrance wall, OSC, that’s terrible show and everyone wants to take pictures in front of the cheetah!)

We start off in ‘Built to Survive’, and a section on the materials and shapes that organisms have evolved for different purposes. A couple of things I liked right away: the use of both living and extinct organisms, including animals AND plants, and the abundance of real specimens throughout the exhibit. Here we get to learn why round shapes are a recurring theme.

Next up, pipes and pumps! We get to try our hand at pumping blood all the way up to the top of this sitting giraffe’s head. It’s surprisingly difficult!

And last in this section, insulation and radiators, including this delightfully creepy deer straight out of one of my old physics textbooks, which used to have problem sets that read along the lines of ‘A fully loaded penguin sled is travelling at 2 m/s…’. But I kid – it’s a nice way of visualizing the square-cube law.

Right next to the deer is an endlessly entertaining thermal camera screen where you can see your hot and cold spots. Fun things to compare: your friends with cold cold hands, your own overly hot face against everyone else’s, etc. etc. Also fun: how rad people wearing glasses look.

The next major theme we get to explore is ‘moving around’, focusing on locomotion and feeding adaptations. There are some classic examples here, like how different bird wing shapes are adapted for different flight styles and needs.

And we also get to have fun flinging fish faces around! This is the sling-jaw wrasse, and it’s a cool example of how the bones in fish skulls work together to allow many kinds of fish to protrude their jaws. This area also has lots of great slow-motion videos to help us see weird and unusual movements, and overall this section has the best ratio of hands-on interactive stuff to specimens and static displays in the whole exhibit.

A final section of the exhibit covers the biomechanics of sensing your environment, a cool part of biomechanics that’s easy to gloss over in favour of things like biting and flying but is just as important. So here we get to learn about bat echolocation, magnetic sensing in sea turtles, and how eyes evolved over and over again.

And this is a great spot for me to segue into one of my favourite parts of this whole exhibit, the incorporation of biomimicry throughout! How do morphological adaptations inform the design of human technology? I thought this example of a bat-inspired cane for people with low vision was really interesting – the cane sends out ultrasound which bounces back and make it vibrate, giving more information to the person using it compared to traditional canes. Not sure if this is widely in use, but seems interesting!

Another cool biomimicry example: the bumps on humpback whale fins are inspiring better designs for wind turbines and airplane wings, because it turns out they help increase the angle of attack without stalling, and enhance lift. Neato stuff.

This is a cool exhibit that was a good fit for the interactives-heavy Ontario Science Centre, and seemed to be keeping the attention of visitors big and small when we visited on a Saturday a few weeks ago. (It certainly kept a group of palaeontologists busy for several hours!) While the first and last sections could use a few more hands-on interactives compared to the excellent middle section on feeding and locomotion, that feels like a pretty minor complaint considering the variety of ways information is being communicated throughout the exhibit. One other thing that would have been cool to see would have been the biomechanics of animal combat, but I’m obviously biased in that direction. All in all, super fun and definitely worth checking out if it comes to your town! Biomechanics: The Machine Inside is at the Ontario Science Centre until May 7th.

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3 thoughts on “The Machine Inside”

Wooooooowww!!!!!! Now THAT’S how you do interactive exhibits! Not just a bunch of lame iPad games lying around. And they all convey their core concepts so much more effectively than most exhibits I’ve ever seen! I’ve got to catch this exhibition if it ever swings by the Dallas/Fort Worth area.

What a cool exhibit! Thank you for showing it to us. 🙂 I hope I’ll get a chance to see it some time.

I wanted to tell you that I wore my Coursera tshirt when I marched for science last weekend. I have encountered so many scientists who are true to Science on Coursera. I will never forget your talk about proof in Dino101. Proving falsehood is (relatively) easy. Proving truth? No. Nigh unto impossible. Real scientists say “I do not reject the hypothesis that……” and “The evidence is clear and convincing that….” rather than “It is unequivocally true that GMOs are safe” (which is a direct quote from a PhD candidate giving a talk here in Ann Arbor — he really ought to know better!).

Thank you, Victoria. I am grateful to you, and to the rest of the Dino101 team, for teaching us how science is really supposed to work while you taught us about dinos.

Your work on that project continues to impact the way I think about … nearly everything.

Vicki, thank you so much for the kind words about Dino 101! I continue to be amazed by the number of people who took that course and enjoyed it, and I always love hearing feedback about the course. It was definitely an interesting experience working on that project, and I hope to be able to use lessons learned during Dino101 as I keep plugging away at palaeontology and science education. Let me know if you ever find yourself in Toronto!